My role as a Director

As one of BISim’s directors of global development, my job isn’t been to “keep things running”. Instead, my job is to transform the way we work for the better. Then to do it again. And again.

My main areas of management focus are design, production, and agile product-ownership.

Design

VBS was shaped by years of customer-funded improvements. In the games industry products are designed, built, then sold—pretty much in that order. The world of fixed-firm price contracting almost works in the opposite direction: product features are sold, then designed, then built.

By introducing Business Analysis and UX Design techniques into the pre-sales process at BISim, we have increased the chance of the customer getting exactly what they want. This works even in very rigid government contracting environments.

Production

Bohemia Interactive Simulations had less than 30 employees when we started work on VBS2. When we started on VBS3 that number had grown to over 100, soon reaching more than 250.

With more people and projects comes more complexity. What worked when we were a small company started falling apart. New production techniques were needed. We looked to bring in best-practices from the games industry, from enterprise software development, and from general business management.

Overall we have been quite successful. One of my favorite indicators is overtime (aka “crunch”). I believe requiring overtime for predictable events like releases is a sign of ineffective management. Once a common practice at BISim, this is now nearly eliminated.

Agile

An important key to success has been our transition to Lean and Agile software development methodologies. I act as a scaled Product Owner for new features in VBS3. Our development organization is formed into cross-department teams focused on different aspects such as content, features, and the core engine. I lead the feature development teams.

By simplifying the organizational design—and empowering leadership at the lowest level—we are able to thrive in a very complex business environment.